Another ComicCon of the year, the MCM cosplay crew took a trip up to the Birmingham NEC, quite the small gallery this time but a nice relaxed weekend, so it’s all good!

Always my official start to the convention year, MinamiCon rolls around once more in time-honoured tradition.  No other event is as much of an institution as turning up to that Novotel lobby to already see crowds of familiar faces like we never left it the previous year!

A much more relaxed event than most in recent memory, as if there was a collective LETS TAKE A BREAK FROM RIDICULOUS COSTUMES FOR ONCE and I think it was a good move, certainly meant I wasn’t running around like a headless chicken for once!  Still plenty of lovely costumes to take pictures of at leisure, and I think overall comfort levels were higher for it.   This year the convention started earlier and finished later, crammed a lot more events in, and ran a chillout kotatsu lounge after the closing ceremony, filled with makeshift kotatsus, duvets, pillows, and many, many games.  Probably one of my favourite Minamis to date.

Taken some time but here’s some photos from the Expo weekend gone by, EuroCosplay had us caught up for the majority but there’s still the odd shot and the Sunday masquerade to go around!

A team effort this time around, with myself, Littlegeeky, Luki, Locke, InvisiGirl, Meltopian, Oz, Shenny, Drift, Yuka, Pounce and Foxy all pitching in the time and effort to cover ECC in full.

2012′s summer con has come and gone, AmeCon returned to the luscious Keele University for a second time, only to find it was vastly lest luscious due to a massive amount of building works running hideously over schedule. Duly crossing off about 80% of the locations from my photo map it was very difficult to find new places to get photos and video without background ugliness D:

On top of that, the main meeting point was a mess of rubble and industrial fencing so getting around and finding gaggles of cosplayers was a lot more difficult than usual. Kind of the same issue I had at Expo, the extra time taken to find people and drag them off to usable locations then ferry back and find more ate most of my day leaving not a whole lot for the actual photography part.. In other words, I’m not happy with the variety of costumes I caught again, I need to acquire more minions. Any volunteers?

Nonetheless! We all tried our best and the above issues – which I was ready to declare the ruination of the entire con when I found out – did not daunt congoers from making the most of it and enjoying the hell out of the weekend anyway. Sometimes all people need is an excuse to meet up and prat about in costume!

Thanks to all who did hunt me down, apologies to all who tried and failed, and a shoutout to the awesome Avatar groups formed on Friday and Sunday, it’s been a long time since I’ve had that much fun with a group and the numerous bending toys I came up with got a fair bit of use! Although I was so busy setting them up I think everyone ELSE got more shots of them in use than I did :p

Finally, congratulations to the lovely Refira for taking the second UK representative slot for EuroCosplay 2012 with her Toothless from How to Train Your Dragon, she’s been making amazing costumes for as long as I’ve known her and it’s wonderful to see one getting some recognition, in the face of some fierce competition no less!

New addition to the album list – London Film and Comic Con – taking place in a temporary venue due to the almighty Olympics.  It’s a far more Western media-focused event than I usually attend but as it’s not far from me thought I’d take a look-see.  Can’t pass up chances to take more pictures now, can I?

LFCC boasts a guest list the likes of which I’ve never seen before, including several people I’d have quite liked to meet which is rare!  Of course this is me so priority goes to people in daft outfits over actual celebrities.

Only attended for the Saturday so the gallery is a little light, it’s also not as cosplay-heavy as many events I cover, and the temporary venue has little in the way of photo-taking-space so apologies for that.

Another Expo, the first one I got to experiment on with the steadicam, unfortunately also the one interrupted by another event double booking the entirety of the useful outdoor area, sigh. Dragging people to calmer areas (quite the walk!) took an annoying amount of time and I didn’t get to catch remotely the number of people I was hoping to. Still, made the most of it and hopefully got some good footage. Won’t find out until I check of course, but first come PHOTOS!

Kinda slacked on the photo front to accommodate videoings, outside of the masquerade at least, so apologies for sparseness. I’m hoping whatever I churn together on a timeline will make up for it! This is mostly due to the outside area being offlimits nearly the entire weekend, inside kinda sucks, the loss of space meant everything was packed tight, the weather didn’t help, and I pretty much had to drag people down the entire other end of the ExCeL to find space.. Even doing it every waking hour of the day before the masquerade I only got a fraction of the people I usually do.. Apparently the tree garden was opened up late on Saturday but by then I’d considered it a writeoff and patrolled the other end, and Sunday I only get a few hours of expo time between doors open and masq start T_T Normal photography service should resume next event, as long as EuroCosplay doesn’t keep me busy anyway!

As always, if you spot photos of yourself and want nicer copies, throw the NertCam number at me in private via whatever means you wish! Use ‘em as you will, uploading to whatever social media of your choice is perfectly fine, credit’s not a requirement as long as they’re photos of yourself.

I’ve also set up something of a Facebook page now, I’ll be uploading some of the highlight photos from each event there as well as here so they can be tagged and be all web2.0 and I can pretend I’m popular! XD

So throw all your love and likes at: ManyLemons on Facebook

Updates can also be found on some other social networky thing called Twitter over at ManyLemonsUK

First event of the new year for me! HyperJapan returns for its third outing in an even larger venue and appears to have smacked its queuing problems on the head from last year, the event is only improving and this year was host to the UK qualifiers for both the European Cosplay Gathering, and – for the first time ever – World Cosplay Summit. The UK is finally on the WCS map!

Congratulations to our winners for both!

Lex and Sands are our representatives for the 2012 World Cosplay Summit with their excellent Vampire Hunter D (Amano version) costumes and performance, and will be attending the finals in Japan.

Yuka and Dahlia will be representing us at the 2012 European Cosplay Gathering with their costumes and performance from Final Fantasy XIII, as with Nomes with her Son Goku from Dragonball Z (which sadly I missed seeing!) at the finals held in France.

Other prizes went to contestants for: Judges’ Choice, Best Junior, Best Individual, 4th place, and 3rd place.